How to Live Your Healthiest, Most Fulfilling Life with Dan Buettner [Episode #627]
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This weekâs topic is: How to Live Your Healthiest, Most Fulfilling Life with Dan Buettner
I am so excited to have my very special guest, Dan Buettner, who is an explorer, National Geographic Fellow, award-winning journalist and producer, New York Times bestselling author and Founder of the blue zones; places in the world where people live the longest. Listen in as Dan shares the impact our environment influences scarcity and hardship, why assessing your social network is important for your health, and how to create a healthier environment.
- Living in an environment of scarcity and hardshipâŚ
- The myths around your body needing meatâŚ
- How Danâs Blue Zones Challenge book is out of the ordinaryâŚ
- Assessing your current social network to impact your health in a positive wayâŚ
- Creating healthier environmentsâŚ
- If thereâs a correlation between eating meat, smoking and lung diseaseâŚ
About Dan Buettner
Dan Buettner is an explorer, National Geographic Fellow, award-winning journalist and producer, and New York Times bestselling author. He discovered the five places in the world â dubbed blue zones hotspots â where people live the longest, healthiest lives. His new book âThe Blue Zones Challenge: A 4-Week Plan for a Longer Better Lifeâ is a four-week guide and year-long sustainability program to jump-start your journey to better health, happiness, less stress, and longer life. Buettner also holds three Guinness World Records in distance cycling.
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Dan Buettnerâs Interview
Other Podcasts you may enjoy!:
- Eating for Longevity with Dan Buettner
- Conscious Nutrition and Longevity with Dr. Gabriel Cousens
- Stress & Healthy Ways To Cope
- Your Lifestyle and How it Affects Your Overall Wellbeing
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Transcript:
Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
Kimberly (00:01): Hi Beauties. And welcome back to our Monday interview podcast, where we have one of my favorite repeat guests. We have the brilliant Dan Buettner, who is a national geographic fellow award, winning journalist and producer number one, New York times bestselling author and founder of the blue zones. The places in the world where people live the longest today, he is talking about a very different angle that is not ever talked about in order to live our healthiest, most fulfilling lives. And I canât wait to get into it today. Iâm going to tease it a little bit because itâs something Iâve never really, um, Iâve never heard about this angle, talked about in health books. And so Dan really gets into it. And itâs the focus of his new book. The blue zones challenge. So cannot wait for our interview today and to share it with you. But before we get into it, I want to give a shout out to our fan of the week.
Fan of the Week
Kimberly (00:58): Her name is NurseCary, and she writes life-changing, Iâve been listening to Kimberly for years, and now a part of her Solluna community. I never miss an episode. She is so smart and inspiring well NurseCary, thank you so much. My love for being part of our community. Thank you so much for your wonderful review. It truly means the world and I hope we get to meet one day in person and beauties for your chance to also be shouted out as a fan of the week. Please just take one minute out of your day, hop on over to iTunes and leave us a review. It is such an amazing, powerful way to support the show. Itâs absolutely free. So thank you so much in advance. And if you screenshot your review and send it over to or views@myselena.com, we will share with you our seven self-love affirmation series, a program for helping to reshape and expand you out of your limiting beliefs.
Kimberly (01:56): Also want to announce now at the top of our show that we are in the pre-sale period of my new book, you are more than you think you are practical enlightenment for everyday life. So if you havenât yet already checked out our presale campaign, please order your book today. You can start reading the first two chapters of the book today, and youâll also get invited into our looped event, which is going to be an amazing community event with questions and meditation and more. And if you get two or more copies, you will also get for free an immediate access to our beyond fear, awakening, freedom to live your best life course, which is very full and has a lot of information to help elevate you past your fear, into breaking, you know, breaking through perceived limitations and barriers in order to create your most amazing life in different areas in love and prosperity in creativity and so on. All right, all that being said, letâs get right into our interview today with the amazing Dan Buettner.
Interview with Dan Buettner
Kimberly: 00:05 Dan, itâs so exciting to have you back. Thank you for coming back to talk to us again. We always love having you here.
Dan: 00:12 Well, maybe I begged beyond your podcast. What do you mean the other way around?
Kimberly: 00:17 Well, before we start talking about the, you know, the new book, I want to talk a little bit about, um, blue zones kitchen, because the last time I saw you was at the book launch, which is at crossroads, which is like right before the pandemic started, right before things started to get so weird or didnât see anybody for like years, but you were, I think one of the last people I saw Dan,
Dan: 00:41 Well, I donât know whether to say Iâm sorry, or Iâm glad, but, but it, when that was a fun night and, uh, amazing people from the plant-based community converged in, I think one of the better restaurants in, uh, in Los Angeles, if not the world, at least when it comes to eating plant-based food. No,
Kimberly: 01:01 It was, it was amazing. And I have to tell this story because, um, because you, you are one of the things I love about you, Dan, is that youâre so humble. Youâre sound youâre so down to earth. So I remember talking to you and being like, howâs the book going? Youâre like, I think itâs going pretty well. And then I talked to someone else, like on your team. And they were like, uh, we sold like 75,000 copies already this week. Itâs number one, New York times, best seller. So I knew you would never say this about, you know, yourself and your work, but I just want to acknowledge to everybody listening, how incredible this amazing work, which is helping people live healthier and feel better and have healthier, longer lives is, is reaching so many people itâs really resonating. And itâs amazing.
Dan: 01:48 Thank you so much for saying that itâs a, well, you know, itâs, um, itâs, itâs, itâs, um, itâs my passion and, and, uh, uh, books like that are the, by-product the idea behind Blueâs own kitchen. You know, um, I started out 15 years ago to reverse engineer longevity and found these five areas where people are living the longest and discovered their common denominators, which I think point us in a really strong direction for what we might want to be doing. If we want to live longer. Of course, one of them is eating a whole plant-based diet and, um, the blue zone kitchen captures, you know, itâs, itâs equal parts, science, writing, national geographic photography and recipes. So I actually went up into the villages in blue zones, talk to 80, 90, a hundred year old women who are the keepers of this 500 year old food tradition and their great genius.
Dan: 02:43 Kimberly is taking basic hesitant food beans, grains, greens, tubers nuts, and making them taste delicious because as you well know, and I know youâre a big, uh, warrior in, uh, and, and, and evangelizing the plant-based message, but you know, a few percent of people will care about animals. A few percent of people care about the environment. A few percent of people care that eating plant based is good for their health, but if you can make plant-based food tastes as good or better than meat, cheese, and eggs, you donât have to sell it. It comes naturally. And thatâs part of the secret of crossroads. And I think thatâs, that was what I was trying to achieve with blue zones, kitchen, and, you know, capture the genius, the culinary genius of blue zones and put it in a book thatâs easy to use and beautiful.
Kimberly: 03:42 It certainly is beautiful. And one thing too, is that itâs very accessible. You talked about peasant food, so itâs, itâs simple. Like I donât, you know, I get a lot of recipe books sent to me and all around and yours is in my kitchen because I can open up to any recipe and no, I donât have to devote my whole day doing like 50 steps and getting all these different processes. Itâs so amazing that this magic and, you know, using the ingredients mean these basic techniques, um, itâs accessible, which I think is key to putting this all into practice.
Dan: 04:14 Well, these people in the blue zone, theyâre not fussy. They were, this is quotidian food to people eat every day. Uh, there are a few maybe Salvatore dishes in there, but most of them are take less than 20 minutes to make a lot of bean recipes. I, you know, as, as you may know, Iâm the big bean evangelizer and I believe the health of America will arrive on the boat on a bicycle, Kerry and beans. And, um, the great genius of blue zones is they know how to make beans, tastes delicious and various soups and stews and salads and even main courses. And, and, um, you know, people, you know, I worked with about 50 cities in America and I get here all the time. I canât afford to eat healthy because I canât go to whole foods and buy organic. And the reality is if you can afford rice and beans or beans and tortilla or pasta for Jolie or some tofu, eh, man, you, you have all the protein you need most of the nutrients, probably 95% of the nutrients you need just with, with beans and a grain. And, um, you know, yes, you need greens once in a while. You need vitamin B12 as you well know, which is easy to supplement. Itâs the only supplement I Iâm in favor of. But, uh, once you have that, youâre, you know, youâre golden. You donât have to remember, you donât have to spend a bunch of money on weight Watchers. Um, yeah.
Kimberly: 05:41 And I think that, that brings up a big point because, you know, besides people saying, oh, I canât, I canât afford, I canât go to whole foods. I like your, like your voice. Theyâre dead. Another thing that people say is itâs so confusing because thereâs all these diets out there and thereâs all this stuff. And it gets like very specific. If youâre trying to follow like paleo, youâre trying to do this, like, you know, 21 day program. And it goes to this and this, it gets very heady. And I think one of the reasons people connect, one of the reasons I connect so deeply to your work is itâs from the people youâre studying real people and how they live. Itâs not just okay, this, you know, a bunch of like, you know, bio hackery stuff, studies that people donât really understand. And these numbers and these charts itâs saying, no, no, no, no. Look, this culture is a group of real humans and this is what theyâre eating, and this is how theyâre living. And this is how theyâre connecting as a community. And as people we relate to people. So that immediately cuts through this confusion of these very heady, you know, just the science.
Living in an environment of scarcity and hardship
Dan: 06:47 Well, Iâm coming to you now from south beach, you know, and right up the street, they have the south beach diet, which is basically, um, which I donât believe in by the way, but, but, um, a lot of these diets are developed and in the offices of doctors or, or marketeers and, and, um, uh, or as a result of, of, of trying to, uh, promote certain nutrients. And I think we start getting in trouble when you low fat or high protein, no carb, no carb. And thatâs not the way we evolved. We evolved humans have been on this planet for about 25,000 generations, 99 and a half percent of them. Uh, we were living in an environment of scarcity and hardship and there people didnât, our ancestors didnât pull wrapper off of food. It wasnât processed. Uh, if they ate meat, it was rare. It was a celebratory food, or it was a necessity.
Dan: 07:52 Most of what fueled our ancestors were, uh, when did it well, roots and tubers and things you could gather, uh, until about 11,000 years ago. And then the very first cultivated crops were lentils out of the fertile Crescent in Turkey. What is today? Turkey, lentils, and wheat grain. And that is, that is how we evolved the last 11,000 years. And, you know, we, we, if you want a pretty good idea of what you ought to be doing, look at what our ancestors have done for thousands of years and that, you know, you can kind of forget the rest
Kimberly: 08:33 Well. And what would you say to those, you know, the, the paleo people that talk about, you know, the, the, the tools and the hunting, the animals, and eating mostly, or eating a lot of meat. I know this is probably something that a lot,
Dan: 08:46 If you, if you look at the paleolithic time humans, weâre not eating a lot of meat, that they were eating mostly tubers and seeds and nuts and berries and things that they could forage, uh, maybe, maybe some insects, uh, occasionally there was a hunter and a kill, um, but they didnât have refrigeration. So that meat had to be consumed there right then and there. So they may have, they may have gorged on meat, you know, after a kill, but th the next few days they werenât sitting around eating meat. And, um, most of the, the, the, uh, dietary studies Iâve done, uh, uh, Iâve seen a pivotal that the times theyâre overwhelmingly eating, plant-based still, yes.
Kimberly: 09:33 And thereâs so much research that shows that. So again, it just shows to like that the marketing of, of taking something and sort of fitting it into, into a diet, into something that, um, you know, it gets picked up by the media, and then it gets misinterpreted. When in actuality, itâs not really the way it was in those environments. In that time,
Dan: 09:53 We average American think about this w uh, consumes about 260 pounds of meat a year. That is an absurd amount of meat. Nobody never maybe king Henry, the eighth, who is obese and, and, uh, uh, had goiters. And maybe he, uh, maybe he ate that much meat, but thatâs not never been something done in human history. Uh, we consume about 24, uh, uh, extra teaspoons of sugar of added sugar every day. Uh, thatâs not how humans evolve. We may be found honey occasionally, or, or, you know, in these blue zones, there may be eating seven teaspoons of added sugar, most, mostly, uh, because, and celebratory times theyâll, theyâll enjoy some cake or something like that. And dairy dairy is just absurd. I mean, dairy wasnât part of the human experience until about 10,000 years ago. And some, uh, some people have developed, uh, the, um, uh, enzymes necessary to digest. A lot of most people, a lot of people canât even digest. Weâre not, weâre not meant to suck on the, the glands of other species and metabolize their babyâs milk. And, uh, itâs not good for us. Itâs not something that we see in any of the blue zones, an insignificant amount. And, um, itâs Americans consume about 400 pounds of dairy a year, which is also absurd where weâve been duped into thinking itâs good for us, and itâs not.
Kimberly: 11:24 And one thing about the blue zones that I love as well is how, um, theyâre spread across the world. So I love that they know itâs between Japan and Costa Rica and Europe and California. And so, you know, what would you say to somebody, Dan? Cause I get this question too, when someone says, oh, well, I tried to be plant-based. And I just think my by my body type needs some meat, you know, everybodyâs, bodyâs different. I think I have a body type where I actually need meat. Whatâd he say to that?
The myths around your body needing meat
Dan: 11:54 Well, Iâve heard alcoholics say they, they need, uh, they need a beer. You know, itâs just not true. I mean, it may taste good going down and they may be, feel better for an hour or two. But, um, if theyâre, if theyâre eating mostly a animal-based diet, uh, their gut is not getting enough fiber, which means their immune system is an optimally fine too. Theyâre probably dealing with system-wide inflammation. They probably donât digestive system isnât moving through with regularity. Their mortality rate is there. Their chances of dying in any given year is probably 20% greater chance of heart disease. Itâs just, itâs just the myth. Itâs a myth to justify eating what tastes good to them.
Kimberly: 12:44 Exactly. And again, taking it back to the people, taking it back to your work, which is looking at these communities all around the world. You know, they say, oh, that people have different body types and different continents or whatever, but there is this through-line of eating these natural foods, this peasant food, these plant foods. So if that were true, that different body types needed a certain amount of meat to thrive. Then we would see that in the, in the, you know, the long-term cultural research, I imagine.
Dan: 13:11 Uh, so, you know, I mean, uh, journalistic integrity, they do eat some meat in blue sharks, but on average, no five times a month. So maybe once a week, maybe a little bit more than once a week. And, and, and a piece of meat, the size of a deck of cards itâs used as a condiment. And, you know, these people were living in areas where they, they had a hard time aggregating enough calories to survive, and their goats, sheep sometimes did that for them. Um, but it wasnât this wholesale industrial slaughter, uh, cruelty that, that, um, goes on in our country. And, um, you know, I mean, if all Americans ate meat five times a month, we, uh, instead of what we do 260 pounds a year, we probably wouldnât have a problem. Um, thereâd be a heck of a lot less cruelty. The, the, um, our carbon footprint from, from animal based agriculture contributes about 37% of all greenhouse gases. So, uh, you know, most of that would go away. And, um, you know, I look at meat as a lot like radiation, we know a lot will kill you. Thatâs manifest, uh, we donât know the safe level, but probably a little bit exposure doesnât hurt you. And by the way, we donât know if people in the blue zones lived a long time because of the meat or in spite of the meat thing. We just donât know
Kimberly: 14:42
How Danâs Blue Zones Challenge book is out of the ordinary
Dan: 15:10 I opened the book by saying, if you, if you are overweight and unhealthy in America, itâs probably not your fault. And the reason I say that is because if you look at, uh, the data from 1980, uh, many of us were alive then, um, the re that we had about one third, the rate of obesity, and about one seventh, the rate of diabetes. Now letâs think about that for a moment, is that because people in 1980 had better diets or because they were more disciplined or because they had better sense of individual responsibility or theyâre better people, no, whatâs changed. Well, whatâs changed is we have about 25 times more fast food restaurants now than we do. Then over 50% of all retail outlets in this country sell junk food. You cannot, uh, get a prescription filled or, or, uh, get your tires changed without being round to route it by a gauntlet of sugary snacks are slim Jims or, or, um, salty snacks or soda pops.
Dan: 16:18 So the core tenant in blue zones and places where people are making it to age 100 at 10 times, the rate we are with a fraction of the rate of chronic disease. Itâs not because they try, itâs not because they have better diets, a better discipline. Uh itâs simply because they live in an environment where the healthy choices, the easy choice, theyâre not expected to always remember the right thing to eat or think about, you know, the food and the Blueâs own kitchen is what people eat every day, because whole plant-based food is cheapest. Itâs most accessible. Their kitchens are set up, so itâs easy to make, and they have time on a recipes to make it taste delicious. So the whole blue zone challenge, um, takes the blueprint of a blue zone and transfers it to your home and your life. So we do challenge people to go whole food plant-based for four weeks.
Dan: 17:18 And by the way, if you succeed at that within one day, youâll feel more energetic within three days, youâll sleep better within about a week. Your digestive system will work better. You know, food will flow through you with greater, um, uh, regularity, as it were within three weeks. Your mortality rate drops by 10%, no dry drops by 10%. So does your chance of a heart disease, uh, and many cancers of the GI by 10% in just three weeks, youâre more productive. Your mind is clear and within four weeks you should lose between five and eight pounds. Wow. Trying, uh, and that should, thereâs a good research behind that, but just going whole food plant based. But rather than trying to tell people, you know, you gotta remember to do this or, or, um, find the discipline. Um, we show people how to set up their social network, their home, their kitchen, their workplace, and to a certain extent, their internal environment, so that the healthy choices mindless. So weâre setting people up for success rather than expecting them to have superhero powers.
Kimberly: 18:31 Well, I have to say, this is the first time that Iâve seen a book laid out this way. Thatâs taking the environment part, because usually, usually I loved blue zone kitchens, as you know, I have copies all over the place, but it is a set of recipes. And so it kind of leaves it to that person to, you know, do this sometimes and do this versus blue zones challenges as practical as it gets. And I think sometimes we get so busy, we need to be told what to do and how to set things up in order to create that, um, that pathway forward, itâs like setting up a med
